Google News Now Will Crawl & Index Images Hosted Off Your Domain Name

Google News updated their image crawl process to include images hosted off the publishers domain.

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Google just sent out their first newsletter via the new Google News Publisher Center and in that newsletter, they announced publishers can now host images off their website domain and the image will still be crawled, indexed and potentially used in the Google News search results.

Google said:

In the past, if your images were hosted off your website’s domain, it was very unlikely we’d crawl them for Google News.

We recently implemented an update to our image crawl algorithm, and are now able to crawl off-domain images. If it works better for your team to host your images on a different domain than your news website, you can now feel free to make that change!

Many publishers use CDNs (content delivery networks) or host images on third-party domain names, so this looks like a good change to their image crawl process and I expect a lot of the sources for the images to change in the upcoming days/weeks.


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.

In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.

Barry can be followed on X here and you can learn more about Barry Schwartz over here or on his personal site.

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